The languid success of logic and facts to dislodge
believers from their mistaken beliefs, calls for a new course in the claim for
morality's mantle; religion fails humanity on ethics.

There appears to be no amount of reason or facts that will extricate
believers from their cognitive biases, or the nucleus of their intractable,
mistaken, and teleological beliefs. Non-theists, in my humble, yet scholarly opinion,
need to set aside the Pathos and Logos based arguments. Instead, nonbelievers
must begin to advocate on the ethical grounds, that, revealed religion is an
antagonist to humanity's progress and ultimately, its survival. It usurps our
innate nature of goodness, and transgresses on our naturally earned ethics.

Further, consider, the believer must first successfully
defend the idea of providence, which they cannot, and then, the veracity of
such a notion, which has been an abysmal failure for the faithful. The devotees
of Christ, fortified only with ancient apocryphal and worrisome scripture--putting
it mildly, cannot attempt to mount a defense that religion offers us a moral
mapping of the mind. In fact, instead, I would argue on the offensive--on the
immorality of Christianity.

Chiefly, a person of Christian religious belief needs quite
a bit of instilling indoctrination, in fact utter brainwashing, to convince
one's self that they, for merely being born, are worthy of "Hell" because an
alleged ancient ancestor ate of a forbidden fruit--the idea of "original sin."
Christianity edifies, and thereby institutionalizes, the fallacious concept of
salvation through willful subjugation and degradation of our native decency.
(This is why, mistakenly, "Christ followers" feel they need a "Savior.")

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Yet, it takes brutish masochism and sheer madness to accept
the outrageously wicked and ghoulish notion of vicarious redemption through
prostrating exaltation, and then evangelizing for two millennia the murder of
an Antiquity's age, itinerant and eccentric preacher. That a bloody, torturous
human sacrifice--the ostensible crucifixion at Calvary,
found at the center of Christianity--can cleanse away your responsibilities and
actions in life. (Actually, there is scant evidence, of any type, for a historical
Jesus and zero evidence for a divine Jesus. The dubious and anonymous, not
eponymous, four Gospels found in the New Testament, are rife with
contradictions and written, at their earliest, decades after a historical Jesus
would have lived, if he did at all.)

Moreover, the notion of a human oblation, as a means of
vicarious redemption--scapegoating, to a perceived, totalitarian deity is
antithetical to human morality; it is the essence of immorality as it is incompatible
with human sovereignty, self-respect, and even life itself. Therefore,
Christianity is not only silent on true morality--reciprocity, altruism, liberty
and life, it is a purveyor of a litany of insidious ideas, spanning infanticide
to homophobia, the endorsement of slavery--treating neighboring conquered states
as farm equipment--to perpetuating misogyny and the bridge to righteous murder.

Religion and the Christian belief in particular, is tyranny
of the mind, when properly understood, can only be construed, at best, as
immoral. Wretchedly, it fetters the believer to fear of punishment even after death.
Still worse, Christianity compels its ardent activists to love and worship an
ethereal, celestial tyrant in life, learning only of his insidious plan through
esoteric, immutable texts. Indeed, a cursory stroll through any number of
passages in Leviticus or Deuteronomy, naming only a few books of biblical spite,
reveals an unmatched wickedness commanded by Abraham's god.

Conversely, morality is innate. Evolution is conclusive on
this fact. It is a far better "selector" to the survival of the
species--humans, than divinely inspired murder, mayhem, genocide and human
enslavement. Christianity, on the other hand, commands compulsory fear,
obligatory love, the subjugation of women, and the willful suspension of
progressive reasoning via a theology of abject despair.

Consequently, rational ethics, not revealed religion,
satisfyingly obliterates the maladaptive and unethical irrationality believers use
to justify their god and even their sect of faith. It is through a systematic
breakdown of the illogical fallacies religionists use to prop up their
dysfunctional immorality--addictive dependence on a non-existent deity--where we
find a conduit conducive to modern, civilized morality, secular and scientific
ethics.

And so, humankind, despite a vile, prolonged era of religious
perversion of our intrinsic virtue, remains moral. We have earned it through
millions of years of evolution. While religion stands regrettably as a dark,
sinister reminder of the true depravity dogma breeds and passes on to its true
believers.

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Frank J. Ranelli is an independent scholar, skeptic and critic, author and essayist. His erudite and iconoclastic style of provocative writing has been extensively published in a variety of news outlets and across (more...)